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Betsy McCaughey Ross Is Not Kidding

Betsy McCaughey Ross is settled in the back seat of her Chevrolet Suburban, her stockinged feet curled in a swirl of papers, pumps and candy wrappers, a Hershey bar in one hand, a car phone in the other. She has a question. She has just spoken at a Planned Parenthood meeting in Albany and is now focusing on her next campaign appearance, a speech to the Nassau County Democratic Committee at Hofstra University on Long Island. ''What do I say?'' she asks an aide back at campaign headquarters, then lets out a sharp burst of awkward laughter.

In truth, the Lieutenant Governor of the State of New York -- and candidate to unseat the Governor (and her boss), George E. Pataki -- sounds more quizzical than worried as her vehicle hurtles down the Thruway. McCaughey Ross presents herself less as a politician than a writer and an academic -- ''I believe in the power of ideas,'' she often says -- but ideas are not on the agenda at the Democratic meeting tonight, and she knows it. Clicking off the phone, she turns to an adviser next to her in the back seat. ''I don't think I should give a stump speech with policy in it, do you?'' she asks. ''Should I give my regular pre-K, H.M.O., pro-choice, economy speech?'' As she fidgets in her seat, a bundle of nervous smiles and energy, it soon becomes clear that she does know what to say, and she begins to preview her speech right there. ''I believe that every family should have affordable day care for their children so that women have a right and opportunity to succeed in the workplace,'' McCaughey Ross declares. ''Does the Republican Party believe that? No.'' Her eyes are closed tight and her face is shining as she imagines the audience response.

At Hofstra, the auditorium is half-empty. These are Democratic regulars, and their evident lack of enthusiasm at McCaughey Ross's arrival suggests that they know her history: how she ran as a Republican with Pataki in the 1994 campaign and helped topple Mario M. Cuomo. How she battled with Pataki from the outset, quit the Republican Party last September and within months announced that she would run for Governor, eclipsing a cast of Democrats -- including Peter F. Vallone, the New York City Council Speaker; Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn District Attorney, and James L. Larocca, a former state transportation and energy commissioner -- whose allegiance to the party was not in doubt.

But here is McCaughey Ross, 49, a woman who has never voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate in her life, unapologetically taking the stage. ''I'm proud to be a Democrat and I'm proud to be running as the next Governor of the State of New York,'' she declares. And then she is off, building into her rhythmic cant. ''I believe in fighting discrimination of any kind -- against racism, against religious bigotry, against gays and lesbians. Does the Republican Party believe that? No!'' Her thin voice sounds almost lusty as it bounces off the walls. Before long, the crowd is joining her shouts -- ''No! No! No!'' -- and McCaughey Ross displays her white flash of a smile and thrusts an arm in the air, her diamond-encrusted watch glittering in the spotlight. More than half the audience rises in applause. She strides off the stage, oblivious to the local politicians waiting to speak, and with a jerk of her head, announces to her aides: ''Let's go.''

There has, in the peculiar history of New York State politics, never been anyone quite like her. A consensus has emerged about this woman, at least in New York's political community, which is that McCaughey Ross is -- to put it directly -- a little loopy. It is a perception that has been explicitly promoted by Pataki's office, which has needed to account for the fact that, were it not for the efforts of Pataki and Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, McCaughey Ross would almost certainly be unknown to most New Yorkers today. (In her more chivalrous moments, Zenia Mucha, Pataki's communications director, describes the Lieutenant Governor as ''an irrational person.'') And it is a perception that McCaughey Ross has encouraged with her bouts of unorthodoxy: the staff bloodlettings; the fact that she remained standing, rather conspicuously, throughout Pataki's 1996 State of the State speech; her frequent defiance of her sponsors, D'Amato and Pataki; her awkward public bearing.

Still, there is little evidence that this portrait of a loopy lieutenant governor is widely known, much less shared, by voters. It is also not completely accurate. McCaughey Ross may be erratic, and she may be given to bursts of naivete and non sequitur. But she is also singularly intelligent, driven and charming -- and accustomed to getting what she wants.

She has been in politics for only three years, and it was nothing she ever considered, much less aspired to. But she is learning the business. Having seen her opportunity -- a weak field of male Democratic candidates, the stronger ones having been scared off by a formidable Republican incumbent -- she seized it. She now finds herself the only woman in the race, closely identified with the potent issues of health care and auto insurance, her campaign largely financed by her wealthy husband, Wilbur L. Ross Jr., an investment banker. (As of her last financial disclosure, she had raised $2.4 million, $2.25 million of which came from Ross.) Whether it is a result of cold calculation or beginner's luck, there are many political experts who, as of today, believe that she will win the Sept. 15 primary -- even if her prospects of unseating Pataki, like those of all the Democrats, are decidedly bleak.

Governing, though, is another matter. McCaughey Ross may well have the discipline to keep her eccentricities in public check through the comparatively brief span of a campaign. But for a number of reasons -- a management style that can only be described as disruptive, an ignorance of the history and habits of Albany and a lack of grounding in any of the political parties -- McCaughey Ross would seem to be particularly ill suited for the job she is seeking. Even her friends, who have high praise for her intellect and heart, take pause at the thought of Betsy McCaughey Ross running the government of the third-largest state in the union.

''Have I told you about the withhold?

McCaughey Ross, a glass of red wine standing untouched at her elbow, has been talking for nearly half an hour about the regulation of health maintenance organizations. The withhold, it seems safe to say, is an unfamliar term to most voters. (It is the practice by which H.M.O.'s withhold part of a doctor's payment as a means of keeping down costs.) Here at dinner on the Upper East Side, as the details pile on, it becomes easy to appreciate what happened the first time McCaughey Ross had brunch with Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader. As McCaughey Ross tells the story, she started chatting about health insurance legislation even before a drink had been ordered, and Bruno raised both of his hands. ''Just don't talk policy!'' he pleaded.

No one who has worked with McCaughey Ross challenges her intellectual rigor or depth. In fact, a complaint made by her ever-changing stable of political advisers is that she spends too much time on policy. ''I can't win by just being in places, shaking hands, being a regular pol,'' McCaughey Ross says. ''I'm going to win because of ideas. So it's really important for me to stay home and read the reports and write the policy things and do the ideas.''

She has always been this way: studious, competitive, an overachiever. It is sometimes easy to forget -- with her two marriages to investment-banker husbands, with her Park Avenue apartment and tailored suits -- that McCaughey Ross was not born to wealth or success. She grew up in a working-class family in Westport, Conn., to a father who was a janitor and a mother overcome by alcoholism. McCaughey Ross won a boarding-school scholarship, then went on to Vassar College and received her doctorate in constitutional history at Columbia University. In 1972, she married Thomas K. McCaughey, and spent the 1980's raising three daughters, now all in their teens, as well as writing for academic journals and teaching constitutional history at Columbia.

Though McCaughey Ross puts more emphasis on the professional side of her resume, she was arguably more of a socialite than an academic back then. In any event, she says that the prospect of being a ''very well cared for, very affluent wife of a Wall Street financier'' made her restless. ''I just wasn't cut out to be a, I don't know, a plantation madam,'' she says. McCaughey Ross lets out a gust of self-conscious laughter. ''Don't use that word! 'A country-estate lady.' It's not my thing. I like to work hard, I like to be engaged.''

By 1992, McCaughey Ross had divorced her husband and joined the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank where she began writing articles that contributed to the demise of President Clinton's proposal for universal health care. This accomplishment earned her the attention of Senator D'Amato, who was looking for a woman to run with Pataki in 1994. It is testimony to the haste with which McCaughey Ross was recruited that Pataki was taken aback when his new lieutenant governor started flooding him with single-spaced policy papers (footnotes included), and sharing her often-dissident views with reporters. ''I'm the quarterback of this team,'' Pataki told her brusquely, in one of their only face-to-face meetings. McCaughey Ross's political advisers reminded her that lieutenant governors are meant to be neither seen nor heard. McCaughey Ross ignored their advice, and Pataki ignored his lieutenant governor.

''Don't you think it's odd not to get any answers?'' she asks now. ''I didn't realize that these memos would antagonize them. I thought they were very helpful.'' She is not being disingenuous. The result is that the second-ranking official in New York is today almost incidental to its governance. She and Pataki have not had a substantial conversation in more than a year. ''I would have liked to have known him better,'' she says. D'Amato and Pataki are now said by associates to view the recruitment of McCaughey Ross as the single biggest mistake they have ever made in politics. The two men, normally eager to talk to reporters, did not return calls for this article.

McCaughey Ross's defiance earned her a punishing wave of stories and gossip, much of it generated from Republicans, designed to portray her as a buffoon. In that regard, her insistence on directing almost every discussion toward policy seems intended to establish herself intellectually, to rebut the portrayal put forth by those who brought her into politics in the first place. ''Have you read my reports?'' McCaughey Ross asks in one interview, her voice brittle, repeating a question she has posed before. ''I wrote them myself.''

The door of the suburban opens at the corner of 11th Avenue and 57th Street, and McCaughey Ross emerges for a sidewalk news conference on her plan to lower auto insurance rates. Suddenly she stops, picking out a dark-eyed young man with a tape recorder who is trying to blend in with the reporters. ''I've never met you before! Who are you?'' she says, pumping away at his hand, not letting go -- as is her style -- until the encounter turns awkward. He says that his name is Adam, and that he's a college student, and McCaughey Ross responds: ''Oh, you're working for one of the other campaigns!'' And Adam, looking a little embarrassed at being discovered, acknowledges that he is indeed working for Peter Vallone.

McCaughey Ross has encouraged the perception of herself as a political novice. And in many ways she is. This, after all, is the woman who did not recognize Al D'Amato when she first met him in 1993. The subject of politics often bores her. One day in May, when Stephen J. Sabbeth, the Nassau County Democratic leader, started talking about the coming state Democratic convention, McCaughey Ross distractedly flipped through her black-and-white composition book (which has ''Betsy'' scribbled on the front). When Sabbeth stopped speaking, she piped up, ''It's a beautiful day for a luncheon!''

It is this kind of disconnected behavior that leads many political people to dismiss her. That would be a mistake. In Sabbeth's office, she took close note of a sign on his wall -- First get elected, then do good -- and was soon quoting it approvingly. Indeed, there is ample evidence that she long ago absorbed the wisdom of Sabbeth's sign. She has taken few positions that might be considered electorally problematic. No one is likely to argue against her proposition that auto insurance rates should be lowered, or that people suffering from cancer should not be denied insurance coverage for experimental forms of chemotherapy. Her emphasis on health care, its merits notwithstanding, is clearly a pre-emptive defense against Democratic attacks over her role in undercutting President Clinton's health-care plan -- and an attempt to distance herself from a position that came under attack as intellectually slipshod.

Even in an era of ideologically indistinct politicians, McCaughey Ross stands out: in six years, she has already managed to associate herself with the Conservative, Republican, Democratic and Liberal Parties. Assemblyman Edward C. Sullivan, an Upper West Side Democrat who has endorsed her, calls her ''a progressive in formation,'' while Ann Northrop, a friend since Vassar and a leading AIDS activist, says McCaughey Ross is politically consistent and ''the most radical person in the race.'' McCaughey Ross presents herself as ''the most socially progressive'' candidate, even though she stood by as Pataki pursued a historically conservative agenda, advocating cuts in welfare, Medicaid and education spending, and the revival of a death penalty. ''I think of myself as fiscally responsible and socially liberal,'' she says. ''But more than anything, as an honest, call-them-as-I-see them person. A problem solver. For example, I support gay rights. A lot of people don't. I'm unequivocally pro-choice.'' There is an unusual amount of antipathy toward McCaughey Ross among her three Democratic rivals, who believe that she is little more than an opportunist. ''What is her rationale for running for this job, other than that she doesn't like George Pataki?'' asks Charles Hynes. McCaughey Ross dismisses such talk, asserting that the only reason she is running is to serve the people of New York. But this is a woman who became a celebrity literally in the space of the 20 minutes it took her to accept the invitation to run for Lieutenant Governor. By all accounts, including those of the many consultants who say she instructed them specifically to get her name into the newspapers, this is someone who clearly enjoys the attention that comes with high office.

Betsy Mccaughey Ross is sitting alone in her huge, high-ceilinged office in the state Capitol. There is a plate of chicken bones on her otherwise orderly desk. It is lunch; breakfast was a Mounds bar, part of a regular daily diet that she accurately describes as ''chicken and chocolate.'' It is less than a week since McCaughey Ross fired her campaign manager, Robert Becker, producing a round of headlines suggesting again that McCaughey Ross is unstable. Still, she seems startled when the subject is raised. ''I wouldn't say anything negative about Robert,'' she said. ''I just think it's inappropriate to criticize employees, no matter what they say. I made the decision that was in the best interest of the campaign.'' She sits back, looking anxiously at her questioner, as if she were a student awaiting a grade from an instructor. Does she consider herself difficult to work for? ''I think -- well, yes,'' she says. ''If I find a letter that has been sitting around for four months, I am not happy!''

Her former staff members, and there are many, say she is a relentless micromanager given to temper explosions, second-guessing, undercutting and disregarding the views of experts. ''She was somewhere between difficult and impossible to work for,'' says Jay Severin, a Republican consultant. ''No matter what I did, it wasn't enough.''

The issue of her temperament clearly concerns her, and she raises it on her own one afternoon. ''I set very high standards,'' she says. ''That's not always true in government. And as you know, I never say anything negative about anyone who has ever worked with me. But I expect the people who have worked with me to share my high moral standards, my commitment to working hard and to producing the best possible product. And if they don't, I wish them well in some other job.''

Ultimately, it is this imperious side of McCaughey Ross that most unnerves the politicians who contemplate her as a governor. And it disappoints the political consultants who have spun through her life, able at once to appreciate her political strengths -- her intelligence, her poise -- and the weaknesses that may ultimately be her undoing. ''She is 90 percent perfection,'' says one consultant who worked briefly for her. Still, it is important to remember that the public sees a different McCaughey Ross, the one who brought a skeptical audience in Nassau County to its feet. From that perspective, the campaign by the Republican Party to discredit her might have the opposite effect. She cannot help but exceed the expectations they have set for her.